Social Considerations
Shia Female Clerics in Contemporary Pakistan: Reinforcing and Reconfiguring Gender Roles and Remaking a Historically Male Clerical Tradition
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mashal Saif
In recent decades, a class of Shia clerical women, with the theological training and agency to contribute to contemporary religious discourse, has emerged in Pakistan. During summer 2021 and 2022, I attended a bi-weekly study circle led by a prominent Shia female cleric, Khanum Tehmina. Drawing on this fieldwork, my paper investigates how Khanum Tehmina employs her religious expertise and agency to both reinforce and reconfigure gender roles amongst Pakistani Shias. The study hones in on the tension that arises regarding Khanum’s advice on the public role of Pakistani Shia women. Specifically, Khanum Tehmina advises that women ideally should not enter the public realm or assume positions of leadership in a mixed-gender setting. At the same time, Khanum finds contemporary Pakistani Shia men to be failing in fulfilling their religious duties necessitating women’s presence, activism and leadership outside the home. The research also highlights how Khanum Tehmina’s lectures both challenge and reinforce the religious authority of the historically male Pakistani Shia clerical community. While deferential towards some male clerics, particularly ayatollahs in Iran, Khanum Tehmina challenges the morals and ethics of several leading Pakistani male clerics, deeming them too patriarchal or dismissive of significant human concerns, which these male clerics dismiss, per Khanum, as ‘mere female issues.’ Untll now, there has been no work on Pakistani Shia female clerics – my investigation of how gender roles and authority are being reconfigured by and amongst the Shia clerical community of Pakistan inaugurates the study of this important topic.
Alternative Spirituality and the Afterlife: Perspectives from Bosnia and Herzegovina
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tina Ivnik
Alternative spirituality has been growing in popularity and becoming more widespread in Western countries for decades. However, little is known about the presence and characteristics of alternative spirituality movements in Southeastern Europe. Based on six months of fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation, my paper examines individuals involved in alternative spirituality in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In particular, it explores how ideas about the afterlife have evolved under the influence of various alternative spirituality movements. Moreover, given that in Bosnia and Herzegovina there are three widespread religions – Islam, Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism – the study also investigates whether traditional religious explanations of the afterlife continue to influence the beliefs of those who otherwise identify as spiritual.
Indigeneity at the Confluence of Ecumenical and Sectarian Christianities: The Case of a Philippine Ethnolinguistic Community
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Scott Saboy
This paper looks into the continuing interface between the Vanaw, a northern Philippine Indigenous culture, and foreign Christian (Liturgical, Evangelical and Pentecostal-Charismatic) traditions. It provides a historical backdrop of this interface, examines the resilience and vulnerabilities of local traditional culture, explores the beneficial and detrimental impact of ecumenical and sectarian missiologies on a particular set of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices (IKSP), and examines the local concept of panankikinnámit ‘intertwining’ to articulate an Indigenous Relational Worldview that can offer a way to develop an irenic spirit among community members adhering to various – even diametrically opposed – expressions of faith. With the spectre of language and culture loss looming over the archipelago’s 110 Indigenous Peoples groups, this study aims to contribute to an emic but areligious perspective on how external and internal forces shape a traditional culture’s sense of identity, and its apprehension of the religious and/or the spiritual.
